Past opportunity

Virtual Lab for Circularity Co-Creation with Stora Enso

About

Many of Stora Enso’s customers have defined sustainability targets, but find it difficult to understand how improvements in packaging development, design and material choices impact achieving these targets. We want to develop a modular-based digital service connected to our business processes and assets to structure and increase the transparency of co-creation work, to create impactful value communication, and to eventually increase quality and quantity of co-creation to support customers in circular ambitions.

Theme Description

At Stora Enso, we want to move towards a circular bioeconomy by providing packaging that is made from both renewable and recyclable materials. As companies and societies are increasingly choosing to replace non-renewable materials with renewable and recyclable alternatives, our customers want that too.

We constantly co-create packaging with our customers to fulfil that need but currently the work is done manually. We are looking for ways to digitize that process and help our customers in creating and achieving their circularity objectives.

The Packaging Solutions division provides fiber-based board materials, corrugated packaging products, and services for a wide array of applications. From thousands of packaging solutions and designs, we want to make sure the client has an efficient way to select the type that answers their specific need. Our aim is to engage the customers in our design processes and bring them closer to Stora Enso. We want to use intelligent technologies to help our customers in their decision making by building a Virtual Lab to connect the data, our customers and us. The Virtual Lab will create new business opportunities, providing service and knowledge alongside our products.

Opportunity Overview

We want to take our co-creation to a new level by introducing a Virtual Lab for our customers. Our objective for the lab is digitizing our current co-creation work modules, creating a tailor-made solution for our way of working.

Through personalized questions and recommendations, we aim to introduce structure and to create an overview for the customer about their circularity decisions.

The lab is supposed to give fast feedback on customer request, provide data-driven indications and recommendations and to showcase the sustainability impact through personalized and powerful visualization. The solution will consist of different modules that will be connected via a common interface, but in this case we will focus on a smart recommendation tool. We want this module to ask the right questions about the customer’s individual sustainability targets and then create personalized recommendations. We are also interested in exploring the possibilities in integrations with other platforms currently in use at Stora Enso. Please see the examples below for functionalities that we are looking for but remember that your solution may be something that goes beyond them.

Focus Areas

Examples of solutions we’re interested in

Intelligent Personalized Questions

Depending on whether the issue is becoming a climate-neutral company or avoiding plastic taxes, the smart recommendation tool should ask the customer different questions. The tool should understand what kind of customer is using the tool and allow them to use it specifically for their needs. Furthermore, the tool could learn about customers’ objectives and needs, in the long run, to become even smarter.

Smart Recommendations

The circular analysis tool should create a simple yet insightful output for the customer showcasing the impact of different material or design decisions. It should also allow a reverse process, meaning that the customer could set targets and the tool would suggest the packaging details. The tool should understand what materials work in different use cases and which materials can be replaced with others based on the set criteria.

An Engaging Learning Tool

We want the tool to be interesting to our customers to encourage them to use both the tool and our sustainable materials. This could be increased through educational content, comparisons between industries or some kind of a gamification aspect. Moreover, the tool should allow co-creation between us and our customers as our aim is to keep all the important aspects of our experts working individually with our customers in the virtual lab as well.